TORONTO — From boardrooms, to the cabinet table, to mayoral debates, Mitzie Hunter has long fought to ensure her ideas are heard — a mission she says began as a young girl growing up with three brothers.
“I absolutely know I have a voice because it started at home around that dinner table,” the 51-year-old Toronto mayoral candidate says with a laugh. “My older brother says I was bossy. How could I not be? I had to be heard.”
Moe Hunter, her older brother, does indeed confirm this.
“She always liked to run the show, tried to be a little bossy,” he says.
“She tried to show leadership and control us growing up, so at times we had to sort of say, ‘Hey, you’re not the oldest here and you’re not the boss,’ but it was a good thing about her, to see that drive about her and to see the leadership about her.”
Former cabinet colleague Brad Duguid says that while in government, Mitzie Hunter was composed and measured but strong in getting her point across.
Hunter served as minister of education, minister of advanced education and skills development, and associate minister of finance, in charge of developing then-Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne’s goal of an Ontario-made pension plan. She navigated varying views on that topic around the cabinet table, Duguid says.
“She also brings a toughness that is not always apparent in her demeanour and I think that comes from coming from and representing a high-needs area like her riding in Scarborough,” said Duguid, who represented a neighbouring riding.
“While she’ll be nice, likable, polite, at the end of the day, you don’t want to go toe-to-toe with Mitzie Hunter because she brings that Scarborough scrappiness.”
For all the accolades from those who know her, it doesn’t appear as though those qualities have propelled her far enough in the Toronto mayoral race. Polls have pegged her support at between five and 11 per cent, and Duguid is the only one of her former provincial colleagues listed on her endorsements page.
But hers is a life dedicated to public service, her brother says, to the point that she has given up a lot in her personal life in order to help her community. That’s a proposition that Hunter herself is noticeably uncomfortable with, but she says she gets a lot of joy from her work.
“I’ve never seen what I do on a day-to-day as work,” she says. “I see it as, this is my contribution.”
Hunter and her family moved to Canada from Jamaica when she was three years old, and she developed a real sense of community growing up in the east-end Toronto region of Scarborough.
She watched as her grandmother hosted Thanksgiving dinners to which absolutely everybody was invited. She watched as her mother, upon hearing that a call centre colleague of her then-teenage daughter had become homeless, asked the woman to come live with them while she worked to find her housing.
“In everything that I do and I want to do with my time in my life, I want to make a difference,” Hunter says. “I want to make a change.”
Hunter’s parents, who worked in trucking and manufacturing, expected their children to work hard, as they had made sacrifices so their children could have better lives.
“They strongly believed in whatever job you’re doing, you put in 100 per cent,” Moe Hunter says. “If you weren’t the best at it … they wanted to see that the effort was put forth.”
Mitzie Hunter was one of the handful of Ontario Liberals that hung onto their seat after the majority government went down in spectacular defeat in 2018 and she won her Scarborough-Guildwood seat again in the 2022 election despite a similarly uninspiring overall tally for the party.
She resigned from her Ontario seat on May 10 because election rules stipulated that provincial or federal office holders couldn’t also run for mayor.
While her gamble appears unlikely to succeed, there’s that drive to give 100 per cent, even if you’re not the best at it.
“She … gave up a job, but that’s what she does,” Moe Hunter says. “That’s how dedicated she is. She may not win, but she’s willing to chance it.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 19, 2023.
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This profile is part of a series by The Canadian Press looking at leading candidates in Toronto’s mayoral byelection. Candidates were chosen based on polling and their participation in mayoral debates.
